Mehri Yalfani’s stories in The Street of Butterflies feature Iranian women dealing with displacement, cultural change, and struggles for survival and adaptation as immigrants in North America. At the same time, the challenges they face also reveal the racial, gendered and cultural anxieties of these same individuals who carry with them the biases of their country of origin to the norms of the new land. “Soleiman’s Silence,” “Felicia,” “If You Were I,” “Geranium Family,” and “Line,” all portray many dimensions of the migrant’s strive (or the refusal) to build a home, away from home. The stories that are set in Iran contain the complexity of the social and political context after the revolution that deposed the shah. These stories provide a glimpse of life in post-revolutionary Iran, where the new regime that replaced the old one continues the suppression and prosecution of political activists, only more harshly and mercilessly. Anyone who has lived under a brutal dictatorship can easily identify with the paralyzing fear of Sara and Nazar in the story, “Books,” the agonizing wait of Zinat for her disappeared son in “Unexpicable Story,” or the narratives of the ten-year-old child whose activist parents have perished in notorious prisons of the Islamic regime in “Where is Paradise?”

Mehri Yalfani was born in Hamadan, Iran. She graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for twenty years. She immigrated to Canada in 1987 with her family, and has been writing and publishing ever since. Four novels and two collections of short stories written in Farsi, her mother language, were published in Sweden, the U.S. and Canada. Her novel, Dancing In A Broken Mirror, published in Iran, was a finalist for the "Book of the Year" in 2000. She has published several books in English, including Parastoo: Stories and Poems (1995); Two Sisters (2000); and Afsaneh's Moon (2002). A Farsi version of Afsaneh's Moon was published in Iran in 2004. A volume of poetry in Farsi, Rahavard, was also published in 2004. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of American and Canadian anthologies. Her most recent collection of short fiction, The Street of Butterflies, was published in 2017. She lives and writes in Toronto.

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